Currency and the Economy in Mid-Tudor England

Abstract

T tHE study of English economic history in the early modern period has undergone a profound change during the last few decades for, as Prof. Fisher has remarked, statistical data have come increasingly to replace literary sources as the stuff upon which our interpretations of the past are based. Through statistical analysis insights into important problems, such as the geographical distribution of wealth, have become possible for the first time; conflicting and misleading figures-nowhere, perhaps, more apparent than in the broad field of government revenue-have been corrected; old indexes have yielded place to new; and almost everywhere it has become fashionable to underpin arguments with statistics of some kind. If the numerate historian has not yet provided a panacea-partly because there is seldom agreement as to what his statistics actually mean, and partly because he has not yet counted long enough or in sufficient fields-it still seems possible that in some areas and within carefully defined chronological limits sufficient has already been done to make substantial reinterpretation feasible. The appearance of Prof. Gould's book' marks this point in respect of currency and the economy in mid-Tudor England and it is some measure of the achievements of earlier generations of economic historians that he can attempt his task in under 200 pages. Broadly speaking, this study falls into two parts: the second, dealing with the exchange rate and the export trade, stemming from and being partly dependent upon the first which is devoted to an examination of the determinants of mint supply, the output of the mints, and the size of the circulating medium. In both parts, but particularly in the second, Prof. Gould is able to base himself firmly on earlier statistical compilations such as those of Prof. Carus-Wilson and Miss Coleman on exports, G. C. Brooke and Miss Stokes on coin output, and Dr van der Wee on exchange rates.2 Even in these areas, however, in the last resort his conclusions are the outcome of his own calculations, and in addition he presents a body of information-on the size of the circulating medium during the debasement, and the volume of cloth and wool exports, I 544/5-I 560/I -which he himself has derived first hand from manuscript sources. While Prof. Gould's book is